The display continued to animate as he spoke, the viewpoint zooming in until Epsilon Trianguli showed as a hot, white sphere rather than as another star. An A2 type star, Epsilon Trianguli appeared imbedded in a far-flung corona of luminous gas, and even in simulation was almost too brilliant to look at directly.
A hypothetical planet swung into view, a sharp-edged crescent bowed away from the star, attended by a clutter of sickle-shaped moons. A swarm of dark gray and metallic slivers materialized out of emptiness and scattered across the system. Other planets appeared in the distance, along with the gleaming, wedding-band hoop of a stargate.
“First in are AI scouts, to show us the terrain. We also need to know if there’s a stargate in the target system. The scouts will find out if there is a Xul presence in the system, and map it out so we’re not going in blind.”
Obedient to his lecture, a Xul station revealed itself, menacing and black, positioned to guard the stargate. A swarm of new objects entered the scene, dull-black ovoids, descending toward the Xul structure in waves. Pinpoints of white light flickered and strobed against the surface in a silent representation of space combat.
“The Marines go in hot, wearing marauder armor and accompanied by highly specialized penetrator AIs,” Alexander went on. “Details depend on what the scouts turn up, of course, but the idea will be to insert a Marine raiding party into the Xul, grab as much information as we can, and blow the thing to hell.”
On cue, the camera point of view pulled back sharply, just as the Xul base in the scene, in complete silence, detonated—a searing, fast-expanding ball of white light that briefly outshone the brilliant local sun.
“Very pretty,” Devereaux said as the display faded into darkness once more. The noumenal scene flowed and shifted once more, becoming a more conventional virtual encounter space. “But just what would be the point?”
They now appeared to be seated around the perimeter of a sunken conversation pit three meters across, the representation of the Galaxy as seen from above spiraled about itself at their feet. Here, the individual icons all expanded into images of people, though their electronic secretaries and EAs remained visible only as tiny, darting icons of yellow light orbiting their human masters. The walls and ceiling of the room appeared lost in darkness.
“The point, Madam Devereaux, is to avoid being put on the defensive again. We were on the defensive in 2314. You know what happened.”
“Yes,” General Samuels said. “We beat them.”
“At a terrible cost, sir. Earth’s population in 2314 was … what?” Alexander pulled the data down from the Net. “Fifteen point seven billion people. Four billion died within the space of a few hours during the Xul bombardment. Four billion. Exact numbers were never available, given the chaos of the next few decades, but an estimated one to two billion more froze during the Endless Winter, or starved to death, or died of disease or internal electronics failure or just plain despair.”
“We know our history, General,” Devereaux said.
“Then you should know that the human race came within a hair’s breadth of becoming extinct. Over a third of the human race died, murdered by one Xul huntership. One! We were lucky to be able to destroy it. And if General Garroway hadn’t backtracked the Intruder through the Sirius Stargate to Night’s Edge and found a way to take out the base there, we wouldn’t be sitting here now discussing it!”
“And you know, General,” Devereaux said, “that the current political situation may preclude a major operation such as you seem to be suggesting. The Monists and the Starborn both are threatening to side with the Islamic Theocracy. If they do, the Commonwealth will fall.” She spread her hands. “If that happens, how are we supposed to defend ourselves if the Xul do come?”
“I submit, Madam Devereaux, that the Human species right now has more to worry about than the exact nature of God. If we do not take a stand, an active stand, against the Xul threat, if we don’t deal with it now, while we have a chance of doing so, then none of the rest matters. We’ll be settling the question of God’s nature by meeting Him face to face!”
“He does have a point, Marie,” another delegate in the circle said. He wore the uniform and the corona of a Fleet admiral, and the alphanumerics that popped up when Alexander looked at him identified him as Admiral Joseph Mason. As he spoke, the light brightened around him, drawing the eye. “We can’t ignore what’s happened out there.”
“Five hundred light-years, Admiral. It’s so far away.”
“It’s a very short step for the Xul, Marie. We’ve survived so far only because we’ve been lost within … what? Ten million stars, or so. Even the Xul can’t pay close attention to every one. But we know the Xul. We know what they did to the Builders. And to the An. And probably to some ungodly number of other civilizations and species scattered across the Galaxy over the past half million years or so. If they locate Sol and the other worlds of human space, they will do the same to us.”
The light brightened around another delegate. “And I concur, Madam Devereaux.” The speaker was a civilian, his noumenal presentation wearing the plain white robes of a Starborn Neognostic.
“You do, Ari?” Devereaux said, surprised. “I’d have thought you would be solidly opposed to this kind of … of interstellar adventurism.”
“I may be a Starbom,” Arimalen Daley said, inclining his head, “but I’m not stupid. Lieutenant General Alexander is right. We need to be careful in setting our priorities. I believe even our Theocrat friends would agree that there are times when religious or philosophical differences must be set aside for the sake of simple survival.”
Alexander was startled by Daley’s statement, but pleased. He had little patience with religion, and tended to see it as a means of denying or avoiding responsibility. Daley’s response was … refreshing.
He opened a private window in his mind, accessed an epedia link, and downloaded a brief background on the Starborn, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. No … he’d remembered correctly. The Starborn had been around for two or three centuries, but had arisen out of several earlier belief systems centered on The Revelation. For them, all intelligence was One … and that included even the Xul. They opposed all war in general, and most especially war based on a clash between opposing faiths. Within the Commonwealth Senate, they’d been the most vocal of the opponents of the military action against the Islamist Theocracy, for just that reason.
Alexander wondered why Daley had sided with him.
For himself, Alexander had no patience whatsoever with religion of any type. Beginning in the twentieth century, Humankind had been wracked by religious mania of the most divisive and destructive sort. World War III had been brought on by Islamic fundamentalism, but other sects and. religions demanding rigid boundaries and unquestioning obedience to what was imagined to be God’s will had added their share of terror, insanity, and blood to the chaos of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And then had come the discoveries on Mars, of buried cities and the Builders, of the mummified bodies of anatomically modern humans beneath the desiccated sands of Cydonia and Chryse.
Science fiction and the more sensationalist writers of pop-science had long speculated that extraterrestrials had created humans, but now there was proof. The Builders had tinkered with the genetics of Homo erectus in order to create a new species—Homo sapiens. It had always been assumed that if such proof was ever uncovered, it would once and for all end the tyranny and the comfort of religion. If God was a spaceman, there scarcely was need for His church. Religion would die.
Surprisingly, the opposite had happened. Though the older, traditional faiths had been badly shaken, the discoveries on Mars and elsewhere, far from destroying religion, had before long fostered new sects, religions, cults, and philosophies by the dozens, by the hundreds, some of them bizarre in the extreme. Throughout the first half of the new millennium, new faiths had spawned and vied and warred